


Getting Into Scraps

by monocletreme (vitreousmonotreme)



Category: Original Work
Genre: Character Death, Consumption of Alcohol and Drugs, Kidnapping, M/M, Pastiche, Poor Decision-Making Skills, Probably Inaccurate Portrayal of Drug Use, Really Bad Noir Metaphors, Sci-fi Noir, and a handsome single robot dad who gets him into all kinds of trouble, this is literally the softest scifi you could imagine I just wanted to write about a moon detective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-11
Updated: 2019-09-11
Packaged: 2020-10-14 18:30:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20605379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vitreousmonotreme/pseuds/monocletreme
Summary: A story about a burned-out socialite moonlighting as a private detective, an ex-military android sharpshooter out for retribution, a missing tech genius, the biggest crime boss on the moon, and a whole lot of bad ideas.(OR: moon idiots be gay, do crime, flirt.)





	Getting Into Scraps

**Author's Note:**

> Crossposted to AO3 by request, and because I figure this thing constitutes enough of an absolute madcap hodgepodge of pastiche, tropes, and profound love of The Penumbra Podcast that it qualifies as a "fannish work."

By and large it had been a quiet day when Lou walked into my office. A quiet week, in fact. Not to overlook the fact that most of my weeks are quiet; Sidearm Investigations does not have what one might call a staggering stream of clientele, thanks to the obvious obstacle of the guy whose name is on the door. Boredom had led me to indulge in a few of the classic vices to pass the time — stimulants, depressants, regret — and my senses weren’t necessarily as sharp as they usually were.

Despite that, the stranger made enough of an impression with his entrance that even now I can call up how he looked when I first laid eyes on him. He was tall for a synthetic: they were usually solidly average, but he hit nearly six feet, which indicated some specialized background. Probably military, an impression strengthened by his close-cropped hairpiece. It would track with the haunted look in his eyes, the tired and cautious way that he slipped in through the door. Though that could have been because of the troubles that slipped in with him, hanging in the air around him like an unfortunate cologne.

Those eyes themselves, though, those weren’t standard military issue. He was definitely an older model. Obvious areas of mismatched color and metal had been used to patch him up in places, clearly visible on his face and throat. I suspected there’d be a lot more such repair jobs underneath his clean but worn suit. One eye was a deep brown, the other an obviously artificial violet, and the latter moved just a little slower than its fellow — not quite the right size for the socket, I thought. Here was a man who’d been abandoned: that much was clear. By the company who had made him, by the army that had bought him, by the society he’d fought his way into. And yet he _had _fought, and fought long and hard enough to earn all those patches and repairs and get back up and keep going. And now he’d kept going right into my office, which could mean only one thing: my assistant had snuck out to play poker with her friends again.

When I remember all this now my brain mercifully attempts to spare me _some _embarrassment, and shows me Lou right-side-up, as though I was sitting behind my desk when he entered. My brain has a bad habit of telling lies to make me look better. I was in a heap on the floor, soaked in sweat and worse, dazed from a hit of jackers that were only just starting to wear off. No wonder he looked like fate itself in size nine shoes, walking confidently through my door for a long-due appointment. An uncharacteristically astute observation for me in that state.

The synth took a good long look at me without saying anything. Out of it as I was, I was aware enough of social cues and the expectations people have of private detectives. It’s not a cheap service, and you want something good for your money. Ethics and standards and moral fibers and all that. Most potential clients would have turned right around and walked out, and he didn’t have the look of a bot who had money or time to waste.

Instead, to my dull surprise, he crouched down with a sigh and slid his hands under my armpits. With a heave of effortless hydraulic strength, he popped me right back into the chair, pushing the hair out of my eyes and away from the link-port at my temple. I watched him, faintly amused by the hallucinatory birds swooping around him, as he scrounged around on the desk until he found my uplink; then he turned back to me and slid it into place over my ear. A smooth flick of his wrist sent it an instruction to get my brain chemistry back in line as fast as it could without causing any damage. I was groggily annoyed at this — who did this guy think he was, my dad?

That image by itself probably did its part to sober me up.

Lucidity took a few minutes to arrive, but the moment that I could get my tongue to cooperate, I said, “You’re still here.”

My pushy visitor, who had taken up a calm and dignified seat in the chair across the desk from me, kept level eye contact. Practically laser eye contact, in fact.

“Yes,” he said. It was a nice voice, low and smooth and rich. Could have been a lounge singer’s voicebox. Another thing about him that probably wasn’t original military-issue.

“To be blunt, why?”

“I came here to hire you.”

Dizzy as I still was from having my brain squeezed out like a wet sponge, I couldn’t help but giggle at this, which turned into a full-blown hungover wheeze. “You’re so determined to hire a jackrabbit? Specifically, _me?_”

“That depends.” Those mismatched eyes didn’t blink, didn’t let me go for a second. “Are you Kostya Cannon?”

“That’s what my father tells me, unfortunately.”

“Then yes.” He settled back in the chair with a look of what I felt was entirely unearned satisfaction.

I was confident enough that there had been some mistake, and that I couldn’t lose business that I would never get in the first place, that I flatly asked again, “Why?”

Satisfaction was replaced by a frown. “Because I have a job to do and it’s my understanding that you have the best chance of getting it done.”

That sobered me up a bit, too. That’s not something you ever wanna hear in my line of work, especially with the kind of conviction he had in his voice. People who think you have something special to provide tend to bring big demands and not to take no for an answer.

“You must have been getting some pretty weird referrals,” I said. “I’m not exactly what most people want out of a private dick, you get that, right?”

“I do,” the robot said, adamant. “But Mister Cannon, the position that makes you such an unorthodox—”

“Unpopular.”

“—an _unpopular _candidate for this job is exactly why I need you to do it.”

“Sounds like a real gas,” I said. “What exactly is it you need me to do?”

“There’s a girl. She needs to be found.”

I snorted. “Isn’t there always. Does she _want _to be found?”

“She’s been kidnapped. Her life is in danger.”

Well, way to make me feel like a jackass. “That’s serious work for a civilian PI, buddy. Not that I usually recommend this, and I know it’s a stupid question, but have you gone to the police?”

Given how even-keeled he’d seemed until now, I was surprised by his look of absolute fury. “Yes, and I’d really prefer it if we could get this started, because they’re currently investigating me for her murder.”

He hadn’t done it. I’d been in a room with this guy for ten minutes and didn’t even know his name yet, and still I could see that as clear as glass. Lots of younger synths tend to be less expressive, either because they’re still a little unsettled in their bodies or because these days they pay less attention to looking and behaving just like organics, but an old military model like this guy would’ve been expected to communicate with his unit as clearly as possible. He was tight with worry, and not over being investigated for murder.

“What’s your name?” I asked, finally.

“Lou Oliver.” He gave me another look that made me genuinely wonder if he had x-ray vision, and then he added, “Hers is Goose McShane.”

“_Goose?”_

“She picked it herself. Something to do with the way they bite, I think.”

I sighed, and rubbed the last of the rabbits out of my eye with the heel of my hand. “Listen, Lou, I’m obviously sympathetic, but how do you know she’s not dead? And why do the police think she is?”

“I came home to a wrecked apartment and everything covered in blood. Cops showed up ten minutes later and I sure as hell didn’t call them. But no body, no sign of her other than the struggle. And she’s too valuable to them just to kill.” He leaned forward with the intensity of his words. “My manufacturer went out of business twenty years ago.”

I whistled. It’s rare that synths make it ten years without replacement parts, at least on Luna. “She’s been doing your repairs?”

“She has a gift. Has since she was small, and she’s only gotten better.”

A tech genius. A talent like that that only offered two paths: mob or corporate. It’s a tossup which is worse — I know that better than most — but I had no doubt which one Goose had fallen afoul of.

“Then what about the blood?”

“The police say it’s more than a person can lose and survive. DNA says it’s hers. But she has a felony conviction. Anyone could have bought her genetic code from the public record and fabricated that blood.”

“Look,” I said, “medical research conglomerates buy genomes, not private citizens. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but they’d have to have a _lot _of money to burn.”

“Trust me, they do. And like I said, she’s valuable, especially if there’s no one looking for her. They’d kill to control someone who can keep synths running without the need for legal repair shops and parts.”

“True. But you _are _looking for her.”

“Hence the blood,” Lou said. “There was other circumstantial evidence, too, all pointing to me. All planted. The cops wouldn’t have looked for her anyway; faking her murder is just about getting me out of the way.”

“It seems like a lot of work for…”

“For two nobodies?” Lou gave me a wry look. “A two-bit criminal tinkerer and a washed-up synth scraping out a quiet living out in the basalts? That’s just what the police said. They have no idea of the trouble she’s really gotten herself into, and I’d rather keep it that way if I can.”

I turned this over in my head for a second, and then asked, “And this ‘deep trouble’ is more worried about you than the police?”

For the first time, Lou smiled. “The last time they tried something with her, I tracked them down and put two shots into trouble’s leg and one an inch to the left of his head.”

I decided then and there that I liked Lou. Anyone with the skill and guts to shoot a Looney mobster to make a point and walk away is my type. And besides, the smile looked good on him.

“That’s why I need you,” he said. “I could find them again, but they’ll be ready for me this time. I can’t go in alone. And as you’ve alluded to, most PIs in this city keep as far from the mob as they can. You occupy a unique position.”

“Now hold on,” I said. “You said you wanted her _found_. Not that you wanted a rescue with guns blazing.”

“Mister Cannon, I want her back safe, and I want whatever help my money can get from you to accomplish that. Everyone I talked to told me that you can’t be trusted because you deal with that lot. All that says to me is that you already know who to ask to find out where she is.”

“I’m not a fighter, Mister Oliver—”

“_Do _you know who to ask?” Lou asked pointedly. “Because time is of the essence.”

And shit, that stare had me pinned to my chair.

I thought about it for a bit. I thought about this business maybe actually making some money for once. About me taking one step further away.

“I might have an idea,” I said slowly, “but all that I can promise you is information. I can do my best to find her. Getting her back is up to you.”

“If that’s how it is, then I accept,” Lou said, with the conviction of a magician about to be buried alive.

“Yeah, alright. So who exactly is it who took her?”

“James Whitney.”

“Oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

* * *

The problem was that I had already told him I was going to do it. It wasn’t that I wanted to, that much was for sure. I got into trouble on my own just fine without kicking the hornet’s nest on someone else’s behalf. Lou was on a path that was going to turn bloody for somebody before he reached the end of it, and fights had a history of going badly for me. So just get the info for him and get out.

I was reminding myself of just how much I didn’t want to all the way down into the sticks, with Lou sitting quiet and composed at my side as we caught a high-speed train across the basalt flats. At hundreds of miles per hour, the skyscrapers of the Sea of Rains turned into a flat gray blur, no evidence of human habitation.

The stop where we got off, on the other hand, was populated to the point of claustrophobia. It was a nuts-and-bolts district: a thousand shops advertising the creation or repair of ridiculously specific technologies, a thousand more vehicles of every kind parked in the road and folded out into makeshift stalls displaying a dazzling array of cheap, fake, and illegal bits and bobs, and a thousand dark winding little streets that sucked away the sound and presence of the crowd the moment you stepped down them. Everything was illuminated by dim chemical lights that were strung between buildings overhead, or perched precariously on rooftops, and the walls were covered with graffiti that was not so much artistic as the architectural equivalent of a dog peeing on a lamppost — KEYS TO THE CITY or JONESY WAS HERE, that kind of stuff.

Jed’s storefront didn’t really fit in among the shops specializing in black market graphics cards for outmoded VR units and body work for only one or two very particular models of car. There was so much competition around here that generally, the only way to survive was to specialize; but hers was an almost comically generic fixit, trying its hardest to blend in and be unnoticeable amid the crowds. It wasn’t a particularly good front, but it didn’t need to be. The camouflage was just the barest nod to the authorities; her real protection came from Whitney.

Short and scruffy, Jed moved constantly, twitching like a bot with a glitch; that’s because Jed suffers from the kind of common sense deficiency that leads her to sample her own supply. It’s why they call us jackrabbits, the nervous twitchiness that comes from overindulging. I knew I would start feeling it eventually, starting with the trembling in your hands, the black flickers at the edge of your vision that made you jump, the jacker-dreams beginning to bleed out into your real life and letting you know that your nervous system had started to fry. Just another sign that my life was rapidly tipping over the point of no return.

Of course, the current most prominent indication that I’d lost control of my life was that I was here to threaten my dealer. The bright side was that this was probably going to be a much quicker way to die.

“Konnie,” Jed drawled when we walked in. She was hunched behind the desk in the back of the shop, where it was so dim that she was barely visible. Light sensitivity was another gift you got from overindulging in jackers. “Do you really need more already? You should’ve called ahead. And who’s the clanker?”

Lou was evidently too polite to be offended, but stressed as I was, I bristled on his behalf without meaning to. “Not here for a refill, Jed,” I said, sharper than I’d intended. “Need a favor from you.”

“A _favor? _Konnie, bud, we don’t have that kind of relationship. I sell, you buy. You know we’re not friends.”

“True enough,” I said. “I’m actually threatening you if you don’t give me answers. No hard feelings.”

Jed gave a low whistle of disbelief. “Buddy, if you think you’re the first to shake me down, then you’re dumber than I thought, and I’ve always thought you’re dumber than a box of rocks.”

“A whole box? That’s generous. Listen, I’m threatening you for this info against my better judgment for sure, but where can I find Whitney?”

She snorted so hard that she nearly tipped out of her chair, only just catching herself on the desk. “You can’t _find _Whitney,” she said. “Are you trying to die, dude? Do you think _I’m _trying to die?”

“I mean, looking at our general life choices, I think some people—”

“Are you _serious, _Cannon?”

I unsubtly popped the button on my holster, and shrugged. “Not usually. Depends on you, I guess.”

“Mister Cannon,” Lou said, his voice low, but I shook my head. If he wanted me to use my connections, then fine, I was gonna use them.

“Shit, Konnie,” Jed said, sounding more annoyed than afraid. “We’ve known each other for like ten years and now you’re pulling a gun on me?”

“You _just _finished telling me about how we’re not friends.”

“Yeah, but we should at least have some kind of professional respect for each other at this point.”

“Come on, Jed, you work for him. I know you have at least an idea of where his main operations are right now. If you’re nice and you tell me, we can skip this whole rigmarole where you whine about how he’ll kill you if you spill.”

“Okay, but consider: he _will _kill me if I spill.”

Before I could reply, Lou cut in, taking a step forward towards the desk. “Would you tell us if we gave you payment instead of threats?”

“Yeah?” Jed leaned forward too, over the desk. “And what exactly could you pay me with that’s going to keep James goddamn Whitney off my back?”

“A ticket to Earth,” Lou said.

Both Jed and I were stunned into silence for a good few seconds, but Jed recovered first. “Like hell you’ve got one of those just lying around, you lying rustbucket.”

Lou clicked his metallic fingers, and my uplink suddenly pinged in my head as it fed me a confirmation — there it was. A permit for travel, destination Earth, digitally stamped and notarized and with a blank spot under _Permit Holder Name. _To my considerable surprise, I saw none of the usual signs of forgery. It was the real deal, and I could feel my fingers twitching and curling with desire, as though they could reach into the nebulous thought-net and pluck the ticket out for me. How the hell did Lou have this? That was a whole new life there, spinning in my mind’s eye. That was worth way more than any information Jed could ever give us.

From the look that came into Jed’s eyes the moment Lou sent us the file, she knew that just as well as I did. She nervously licked her lips, and then said, “For that, give me a little time and I’ll pinpoint him to wherever you want. I can ask around, know for sure.”

“Then we have a deal,” Lou said.

“No, no. No we don’t,” I said, almost panicking in my rush to cut both of them off, grabbing Lou by the arm and pulling him back from Jed’s desk. “For that, you’re going to have to give us more.”

“Am I? Because it sounds like your friend here is offering—”

“You’re not dealing with him,” I said sharply. “You’re dealing with me.”

Lou gave me a look that let me know I was going to regret this later, and pulled his arm away, but he didn’t say anything.

It was too late, though; Jed had gotten recalcitrant. “What the hell do you want that’s _more _than where Whitney is?” she demanded. “Do you have any idea how much that bastard travels? How paranoid he is? He owns half this rock and he keeps an eye on _all _of it. Random movements, army of bodyguards, the whole shebang.”

“Then find someone else,” I said. “Find out where he’s keeping a synth mechanic named McShane. I doubt he’s dragging her everywhere with him so even you should be able to do that.”

“I don’t care if you want me to find you the Duchess of Pluto—”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you wanted this ticket,” I said. “But I guess not, right? You’re sitting here with a cushy job which is about as complex as you can handle, you’ve got it in good with one of the most powerful men on the big rock, you’ve got all the drugs you want and no skills or connections — what good _would _it do for you to leave?”

Anger isn’t easy. It takes motivation and work to get really, truly angry, and Jed hated nothing so much as real work. But the look she gave me then could have reorganized all my case files, repainted my office, and probably replaced my assistant.

“What, do you think that just because I’m not a rich boy with a fancy name, I can’t dream of getting out of here? I can’t do anything worthwhile with my life just because I’m not—”

“Then get us a location,” I said, “and take the ticket.”

“Transfer it, then!”

“You get it when we know where Whitney and McShane are. Not until then.”

There was a long moment of tense silence, during which I mostly wished I believed in a higher power who could be implored to keep me from fucking this up any worse than I already had.

For the first time since I’d known her, Jed made the right decision. “Fine,” she said. “Give me a few hours to ask around and I’ll get you your damn address.”

“Cool,” I said.

“I’ll call you. I’ve got your number.”

“Of course you’ve got my goddamn number, you’ve been selling me drugs for a decade.” I stepped back, out of her corner of gloom, and opened the door. “After you, then.”

“What a gentleman,” Lou said, glancing one last time at Jed before he stepped through. Somehow, he kept his tone totally even and free of sarcasm or anger and yet it still sounded like an insult. I was both impressed and envious of this skill.

We stepped back out into the street, and I looked at him, bracing myself for the reaction that I had probably earned in there.

“Can we trust her to do it?” he said instead.

“Probably? She’s never poisoned me, so I trust her about as much as I trust anyone. What the hell _was _that? And I’m not talking about your total inability to bargain, I’m — where in hell did you get a blank travel permit to Earth? Why was this not something you told me about?”

“It didn’t seem important,” Lou said. “It’s not related to what I hired you for.”

“Bull_shit_,” I said, loud enough that some people nearby actually glanced our way. “That’s not an insignificant detail. Either you’re secretly rich, which I doubt because then you could afford to hire someone better than me, or you’re somehow in this way deeper than you told me about. And if you are, then I’m _done, _because I only barely agreed to do this in the first place. I should be done anyway, because all _you _have left to do is whatever insane plan you have to get this girl back, and if you’re going to play games like that then why the hell would I ever go into a fight with you?”

“I told you the truth.” Lou’s eyes were bright with sudden anger, and after turning on me a look with a force of pure fury that almost made me take a step back, he simply turned, started walking away.

“The _whole _truth?” I was smart enough not to grab him again, as much as I wanted to take him by the shoulders and shake him. “Why the hell are you even here? Half the people in this city would abandon your missing girl in a heartbeat if they had that ticket. What makes you so cavalier about throwing this one around?”

Lou stopped walking, directly under one of the hanging lights, and looked back at me. Above him rose the distant towers of the Ocean of Storms, a million lights blazing against the eternity of night. Above that, there were only three things — infinite velvety blackness only barely tinted by an artificial atmosphere. The innumerable dim stars like mothholes in its fabric, paling in comparison to the manmade constellations below. And the great, hovering orb of the Earth, a deceptively distant neighbor gazing down on us.

It was almost a new moon, so the stars had been out for days now, the night constant. I’m told that on Earth, during the new moon, they can see the lights of our great shambling nameless city illuminating this rock in their sky when it’s dark. We have to look at _them _all the time, a constant reminder of where we could be.

Where I could have been, maybe, if I’d just been smart enough to get out before the inevitable crash. After all, I’d had a permit like that once, stamped and signed and emblazoned with the family name that had qualified me for the privilege. But that opportunity was long gone, and I was standing here, resisting the desire to drop to my knees and beg this man to explain to me what he could possibly have found that was worth more than leaving.

I must have looked pretty pathetic, standing there, because after a moment Lou’s look went still and quiet.

“What good to me is one ticket?” he asked, his voice hard to hear above the crowd.

“I honestly don’t understand,” I said. I didn’t know what else I _could _say.

“I’m not surprised that you don’t,” Lou said. It wasn’t a cruel statement — he sounded sad, if anything.

We stood there on the sidewalk in silence. I felt deflated; Lou just looked like he had composed himself again, settled back into himself and his conviction after this momentary lapse.

At last he broke the silence. “Mister Cannon.”

“Look,” I said, helplessly, “call me Kostya. Please. Just — not Cannon.”

“Kostya. Considering that we apparently have some time to wait, would you care to pass that time by getting a drink with me?”

I looked up in sharp surprise. The look on his face was, if not apologetic, at least enough to puncture my anger.

“As long as you’re buying,” I said.

He actually laughed at that, a chuckle and a smile that made his teeth flash sharply white in the dark against the flat blue-gray of his skin. “Of course. I’m paying plus expenses, aren’t I?”

My uplink told me that there was an accident on the Kepler rim speedway, that another politician had been arrested in the latest ongoing bribery scandal, that it was twenty-three degrees out, and that I had a priority message from Axel, probably yet another profuse apology pleading with me not to fire her for disappearing in the middle of the workday again. The background noise of lunar life. I ignored all of it.

“You sure are,” I said. “And while we get that drink, you can tell me whatever long story is behind all this. Because I need to know how deep this is so that when you walk away I can dig myself out.”

Lou’s smile was replaced by a more somber look, and part of me regretted saying it, even if it was a totally reasonable request vis a vis my continued survival. “Fair enough.”

“Okay,” I said. “Do you have a place in mind?”

* * *

“She’s my daughter,” Lou said, staring down at his glass.

I had to stop mid-sip of my own drink to keep myself from choking in surprise. What anger I had carried with me, sulking, out of the tech market and out into this quietly run-down neighborhood and this comfortably run-down bar, shook and dissipated.

Then I threw back the rest of the glass all in one go, and signaled the bartender for another. It wasn’t top-shelf, but it was on Lou’s dime, and the only thing that tastes better than expensive is free.

“Sorry,” I said. “I guess I was assuming that she was a girlfriend or something.”

“No. She’s only seventeen. I should have kept her out of all this.” He picked up his glass, looked at it moodily for a second, drank.

“Not to be ignorant,” I said, uncomfortable with this new tension, “but does alcohol actually _do _anything for bots? I’ve never asked.”

Lou gave a little huff of laughter. “Depends on your model,” he said. “I was army issue. Can’t always count on solar panels or backup generators out in the field, so they built us with an emergency alternative. We were carrying rations anyway, so it was useful to be able to convert the leftovers into energy for us, too.”

He reached down, rapped on his abdomen just below his ribcage with a distinctly inorganic sound. “Special battery,” he said. “Now, taste is a whole different matter, but — well, I had talented help.”

“Military,” I said. “So you’ve been off Luna?’

“Once. When I was young.”

The way he said it made it clear that going down this path any further was not a viable option for stalling. “Goose gave you tastebuds, huh?” I said. “But she’s not an android.”

“No. She’s human.”

“Well, pardon my Venusian, Lou, but how the fuck does a handsome robot like yourself end up with an organic daughter?”

He chuckled into his drink, and took a slow sip before answering.

“I was on the street, back then. On the verge of breaking down for good. I’d made it a good long while, I’m proud of that, but I knew it wasn’t going to last forever. She was alone, in about the same situation I was, when she found me. She pieced me back together, and I raised her. It’s not like she’s had any other dad. Besides, honorable discharge comes with citizenship, and we put the adoption through legally.”

I raised my eyebrows at him. “Don’t they tend to make it pretty hard for synths to do that kind of thing? Even citizens?”

His smile twitched a little wider. “We’ve never really bothered trying to survive within the letter of the law on this rock. Nobody does, you know that. It was important to both of us, I had money enough for a few bribes, and ultimately no one really cared enough about us to put up a fight.”

“Nobody except the biggest mob boss and drug kingpin in the Mares.”

“Yeah, well.” Lou flipped over his empty glass. “Like I said. We survived how we could. Whitney likes to control people by offering them what they want, and I guess he figures that synthetics have simpler wants than you all do, because he employs a _lot _of us. Half his security force. And why not? Most of the time he protects us better than the law does. And after he caught wind of her talent, he paid us good money. At first.

“Then he sent me the ticket.” Even now, I could see the anger making Lou’s body tense. “Just one ticket. Trying to _buy _her from me. My _child.”_

“Ah. And that’s when you shot the most dangerous man on the moon.”

“I do my best as a father,” Lou said. “And I’ve fucked up pretty badly, that’s obvious. But I tried to make my point.”

“I think you’re doing just fine under the circumstances. You clearly love her, and that’s more than a lot of people manage.”

I knew that Lou would be giving me another one of those piercing looks, but I didn’t look up to meet it. If he had looked me up before he’d hired me, then it wouldn’t take a genius to read a whole library into what I’d said. My family problems were, of course, the stuff of tabloid legend.

I found that I suddenly cared less than I would have expected.

“A refill, Scraps?” The bartender had crossed back over to our seats at the shadowy far end of the bar, and interrupted the mood that had once more grown strange between us.

“For both of us, thanks,” Lou said, with a wave of gratitude.

I didn’t even give him five seconds. “_Scraps?”_

“Old nickname from my army days. I had a tendency to get into fights, and that meant a lot of improvised repairs.”

“_You, _get into fights? I can’t imagine.”

“Yes, well, I’m told I can be a bit stubborn, and I didn’t always agree with other people,” he said lightly.

“See, I never needed a goal to get into trouble. Just a suggestion.”

“And what _about_ you?” Lou turned that asymmetrical gaze on me again. “How’d you end up here?”

“I was born here,” I said. “Never been off the moon.”

“Not what I meant and you know it, smartass.”

“Well jeez, I don’t have a sob story, Oliver,” I said. “There’s no tragic excuse, no noble failures. The gossip streams pretty much got it right. Scion of one of the great corporate dynasties, brought low by scandal. I was a spoiled rich kid who loved to party and had no concept of consequences. I made some stupid decisions, ended up in a lot of lurid headlines, got arrested a few times, eventually made enough of an embarrassment of myself that my father gave me a wad of cash and told me to do whatever I wanted with it as long as he didn’t have to hear about me anymore. I was born with everything a person could want, I was exactly as much of an asshole as that makes most people, and now what I’ve got to show for it is a chemical dependency, a divorce, and a business that I pretend isn’t run off my dad’s hush money. There was nothing noble about it.”

“I see.” Another contemplative sip. “And what exactly made you choose setting up a detective agency and employing a nineteen-year-old compulsive gambler as the best way to spend that money? Like you said, you’re not the classic type. Most of the other private eyes I looked at are ex-military, from down on the basalts, not up in the starscrapers. People you pay for some kind of justice when the law, the mob, or the capitalists are typically unforthcoming. Some of them just glorified mercenaries, honestly.”

“Mostly just that I’ve always been a nosy, impulsive bastard,” I said, figuring I was already being honest. “Could’ve been a reporter, maybe, if I wanted an honest job, but no news outlet on this rock was gonna pay to put me onscreen when I’d given them so much material for free. And I was younger and angry. It seemed appealingly dramatic. Axel didn’t come in until later, and she’s … she’s a better kid than she seems at first. A worse assistant, but it’s not like that makes a huge difference. I’m not exactly in high demand.”

“I’d apologize for my first impression if I had actually met her,” Lou said wryly.

“Your Goose sounds like the kind of person she’d get along with,” I said. “But look, if you knew all this about me already, if you knew about my _secretary_, why the hell did you come to me with this? Knowing what you did about me, why was _I _the person you trusted?”

“You say you started this place on a whim,” he said. “If your whims led you to place yourself among those who help people who can’t get help anywhere else, and you’ve stuck with that ‘whim’ for as long as you have, I figured that I could trust you.”

As a guy who spends a lot of his free time hallucinating recreationally, I had to take a moment to process that he really had said that. Then I shook my head. “Well. That’s a first. You’ve sure got an interesting perspective there, Lou.”

“You seem competent enough, at any rate.”

“I hope so. I’ve always thought competent men are more attractive.”

“Is that so?” Lou gave me a look. I’d gotten similar looks many times before, although none from men with resumes as impressive as shooting James Whitney. It was an attractive CV, I could admit that, and that smile was an excellent reference.

On the other hand.

I let out a breath. “Really,” I said. “But just to be clear, Lou, — I, uh, try to keep a firm line between my business and private lives. Even _I_ have to be able to make _one _smart decision. Also, I’m a disaster area, and I’m absolutely certain that a man like you could find a guy who doesn’t need a relief fund.”

“I’ll choose to take that as a compliment and a recommendation of your good qualities.”

“I mean, sure, you can do that. Besides, is now really the time? I’d think that you’d be more worried, considering the circumstances.”

“Mister Cannon—”

I cracked a pained smile. “Really. If you can flirt with me, you can call me Kostya.”

“Kostya,” Lou said. “I’m not afraid. I trust in your competence, and in my daughter’s. More than that, I know that the only people who should be afraid are the people who are going to try to stand between me and her. The rest is just waiting.”

“Boy, you’re sure making it hard to turn you down.” There was a question itching at the back of my mind, and try as I might, no matter how stupid I knew it was, it wasn’t in my nature to leave it unasked. “Speaking of turning down … you really weren’t tempted at _all _to take that ticket? No offense meant.”

“Not for a second,” he said, not sounding offended. “Not for the smallest unit of time that my processors can detect. Why? Would you have?”

“Hell, how would I know? I don’t have a daughter. I have an assistant, but if I suddenly bailed to Earth, she’d probably have a great time running her illegal gambling out of my office instead of in the alleyway behind it. As I am now? Yeah, I’d take it. But I don’t think I have anything Whitney wants that bad.”

Lou regarded me with something that, thankfully, was not quite pity; I didn’t think our budding whatever-this-was could have survived pity. “No one else, huh?”

“I thought you ‘weren’t surprised.’” I sketched quotes in the air with my fingers, and then shrugged. “Last time I checked, my ex-husband and his fiance were living on Venus and expecting a kid. That was a while ago, though. The one advantage jackers have over alcohol is that they don’t tend to make you stalk your ex’s social media profiles at two in the morning. As for friends … I mean, you’ve met Jed.”

“You need to reevaluate your definition of ‘friend.’”

I laughed, without much feeling, but Lou seemed surprisingly serious. I wondered at it, at the thought of having people to _care _about. About having people, having _anything_, that inspired the kind of single-mindedness that drove Lou. It was clearly a double-edged sword; his nickname and his many seams were proof enough of that, and I shuddered to think what things would have gone like back at Jed’s if I’d let him bargain with her in his driven, blinkered way. It was a terrifying prospect. It had the potential to get me killed if I got too close to it.

And yet there was something mesmerizing about it, something magnetic. It called out to something buried deep in the decayed recesses of my moral fiber that whispered, _Wouldn’t it be nice to care like that?_

I found myself unexpectedly hesitant to answer.

My uplink let me know, without fanfare, that Jed wanted to know if I felt like meeting up for a drink and a game of cards. Our usual, unsubtle code that let me know that she had new product in. Probably the last time I’d ever see it, no matter how the rest of the night went; at some point I’d crossed that Rubicon without even thinking about it. I stared at the artificial wood grain of the bar, and remembered a little bitterly my earlier thought about Jed, finally making the right decision for once in her life.

Then I finished my drink. “Lou,” I said, standing up, “it sure was considerate of you to buy me a couple of rounds. I’ll have to pay you back.”

“I told you, it’s part of the expenses.”

“No, I insist. You’ve shown me this great bar. I should take you somewhere nice, too.” I flicked the message over towards his uplink signal. “Unfortunately, I don’t know anywhere nice, but I can take you to a hidey hole with a dirty rat in it. Will that work for you?”

Lou’s eyes widened slightly, and for a second I saw there slight surprise, silent gratitude. “Kostya, I have never been so eager for an excursion in my life.”

“Then it’s a date.”

* * *

By the time we got back to her office, Jed was already almost packed. The few items of value within her shell of a workshop had been shoved into a suitcase dusty with lack of use; the curtain that had separated the front from the back was open for the first time in the ten years I’d been coming here, revealing a tiny one-room collapsible apartment. It was a mess of half-open drawers and partially revealed furniture, the foldaway kitchen butting up against the bed, the sheets and mattress tossed to the floor among the other discarded bits and pieces of her life.

For the first time since I’d known her, I felt a sudden pang of empathy for Jed. Knowing her had never been a pleasure, but I couldn’t imagine _being _her was any more so. Not looking at that tiny room and the little heap of everything she owned, most of which she had apparently decided wasn’t worth the effort of taking with her.

Jackers are a drug for the discontented; you don’t use them if you don’t have something you need to run away from. Pop one and it puts the steering wheel of your brain in your hands. Your senses at your command. Whatever fantasy you want to live, whatever emotion you’d rather be feeling, whatever fucking unicorn you want to ride; for as long as the chemical cocktail hangs around your brain, it looks and smells and tastes and feels much more real than whatever lingering sensation of your actual body lying on a floor somewhere manages to sneak through to your conscious mind. That’s why Whitney dealt in them — Lou was right to point out that he preferred to catch his flies with honey rather than vinegar.

The thing Whitney knows is that giving someone what they want is a pretty good way to destroy them, too. The addiction is more than chemical, the withdrawal not just shakes and pains and sickness. Once you’ve felt your dream of escape become a reality, walked in it and tasted it and had whatever you could possibly want, coming to and remembering that you’re still where you started is a kind of despair I can’t begin to describe. That’s why you reach for the next hit, the next fake escape. And Jed was _always _reaching.

I wondered what she dreamed about. I tried not to think now about my own dreams.

When we came in, Jed was elbow-deep in a brand-new hole in the wall, drawing out fistfuls of what looked like honest-to-god paper currency, along with a few bits and pieces of what had to be jewelry. She looked up, saw us, scowled, and withdrew her arm long enough to shove a piece of paper at my chest. “There’s your address,” she said, already turning back to dig for the rest of her stash. “They took the girl there night before last and my guy says he hasn’t seen her come back out. And you’re in luck. Whitney’s coming to talk to her tonight. About one in the morning.”

“Five hours,” Lou murmured. He didn’t sound concerned about whether that would be enough time to get ready for an all-out assault on the place.

Jed slammed her suitcase shut and grabbed what I like to call an invisibility coat — not the high-tech lightbending shit that scientists have been messing around with for centuries, but a knee-length garment that confers invisibility on the wearer in two ways. It is so utterly nondescript and unimpressive that it’s hard to look straight at one without your eyes simply sliding off, an effect intensified by a crowd; and it does this by being so grubby that it is of no describable color actually within the human visible spectrum. Wearing one in the right way to take advantage of this effect is a particular skill, which is why I wear a bright red jacket and tend to announce myself when I walk into the room. You have to play to your strengths.

“You’re in a damn hurry,” I said. “What, you think Whitney’s gonna catch you that quick?”

“You really think he trusts me?” She shrugged on the coat and vanished into its folds. “Boy, have you got another thing coming.”

“The permit has been transferred,” Lou said quietly.

“Then I’m gone,” she said, clicking the suitcase shut with an actual metal key. “Konstantin, I tell you this freely: you are the stupidest person I’ve ever met. And you’re a real jackass. But despite that, you’re like a fundamentally decent person, which is going to get you absolutely nowhere out here, and that’s a shame.” She paused as if going back over this, then nodded satisfied and said, “Yeah. Real shame.”

“Good luck,” I said, surprising myself both by saying it and by meaning it.

Jed gave me the kind of look that I give my cat when she leaves me little dead gifts on my pillow: the effort is not at all appreciated and you’d rather not have it, but you know that the poor simple creature doesn’t understand the foolishness of its offering. “I don’t need luck,” she said. “I need _your _luck worst of all.”

“Fair enough. Go screw yourself, then.”

That, somehow, got a laugh out of her. They do say we Looneys are a chimerical bunch.

She tapped the suitcase twice on the side and a mini-antigrav system flickered to life on the bottom. It buzzed like a broken fan, but succeeded in lifting the luggage away from the friction of the ground by a few inches. Jed didn’t spare a goodbye for either of us, or even a glance back; she just flung the door open and vanished into the shadows of the dark side of the moon.

“I am really, genuinely concerned about your idea of a friend,” Lou said. “Do you think she’ll have left any weapons or identification behind that might help us get into the warehouse?

Jed had only given me an address, scrawled on the page in the uneasy handwriting of someone who was unused to writing in longhand. No other info, no indication that it was a warehouse.

“You know the place,” I said, not a question, committing the address to memory and then overhand tossing the crumpled paper through the open bathroom door into the toilet, which automatically flushed. “Ever been inside?”

“Only once,” Lou said with a grimace. “I don’t know the layout well.”

“Still better than going in blind. I doubt ID would do us much good, but weapons, maybe. Jed’s managed to survive in this business for a long time, and she can’t possibly have fit all of her gear into that suitcase.”

He nodded, and we split off to different corners, turning over assorted piles of bric-a-brac and scrap, searching for anything useful. The room was halfheartedly decorated like the vague idea of a cluttered workshop of no particular specificity, but most of it was dusty enough to make it clear that they were just props. A blatantly unused rack of tools on the back wall did their best to announce that this was a legitimate business; I didn’t find any guns among them, but I did uncover a nasty little shiv of a knife made from what looked like the alloy they use to make starship bulkheads. That I pocketed, figuring I’d find a sheath for it later.

Rummaging in the desk and the bedroom, Lou had already had better luck turning up a nasty-looking snub-nosed pistol and a genuine gunpowder shotgun, the barrel roughly sawn off. The second I saw the latter, my heart sank. “Oh, shit.”

Lou glanced down at it. “What?”

“Whitney’s people don’t carry gunpowder weapons.” I started desperately trying to extricate myself from the piles of stuff in the corner, and immediately tripped, going sprawling into a tool bench like a particularly ideosyncratic gymnast.

“So? She bought it for herself, then.”

“_Yeah_,” I said. “And who is the _one _person on the Moon who controls shipments of those guns? Who is the _only _person she could have dealt with to get that thing?”

Now, I’m pretty sure that synths don’t breathe, but Lou did an impressive job of drawing in a deep breath and letting out a sigh. “Salazar Keys,” he said. “So your friend was playing both sides of a mob war. That is…”

“Stupid,” I said. “So stupid that later, when we have survived and are telling funny stories about this, we’re gonna need to invent new words for how stupid it is. Lou, think about what she said. About her hurry to get out of here.”

Lou went still. “They don’t trust her,” he said. “They know, or at least they suspect. Which means that if she was asking odd questions—”

“We should be leaving absolutely right now.” I managed to escape the loving embrace of the junk pile and stumble to my feet. “Grab the guns and let’s—”

Someone knocked on the door.

Lou swore with a grace and fluency the likes of which you only ever get from old soldiers. I would have complimented him on it if I wasn’t frozen, trying to think of what to do.

I didn’t need to, apparently. Lou stopped swearing and, with a couple of quick hand gestures, motioned me to the left side of the door. I did, figuring he had a lot more tactical experience, trying my best not to kick over any of the loud trash on the floor. I had scooped a crowbar off the floor; Lou was holding his own gun, with Jed’s pistol tucked into his belt.

Another knock. “Jed!” a voice shouted. “Open up! We’re from the boss, we need to have a word!”

Both of us were tense in readiness.

Words were mumbled on the other side of the door. Then the visitor kicked it, popping the flimsy hinges right out of the doorframe and sending the whole kit and kaboodle straight to the floor with a rending crash. The two men outside — one unusually tall, one in glasses — wasted no time in stomping in, presumably trying to look threatening.

I hit Glasses in the stomach with the crowbar and he doubled over, nearly toppling onto the floor. He had no air in him to resist when I took him in a chokehold. Lou went straight for the knockout and shot Tall twice, the flash of bright orange stun blasts illuminating the room and producing an instant smell of ozone. Then he turned and shot Glasses out from under me, dropping him in one hit.

I opened my arms, and the limp gangster slid out of them. “Well, shit,” I said, catching my breath. “You’re good with that thing.”

“I was built to be,” he said. “Come on, we should tie them up and get out of here. The stun will wear off eventually.”

“Why bother? They didn’t see our faces, and they were here for Jed, not us. We’re not going to be followed.”

“Not for us,” he said. “For her. To give her a head start.”

“Wow, you’re serious,” I said after a moment. “Okay, sure. You’re the one paying for my time. And her ticket.”

There was no rope anywhere, because who actually _has _rope, but there were some thick electrical cables underneath a workbench, and we bound them to each other on the floor, back-to-back. Then we left, following Jed into the dark to start our little war.

* * *

As far as I know, Jed made it out that night. I can’t say for sure, of course, because luckily I never heard from her again, but a guy can hope.

Lou and I, on the other hand, followed the lead she’d given us down into the recesses of the Mare Imbrium. Out by Sullivan Spaceport stretched mile after mile of warehouses and industrial wasteland, holding and processing everything that it takes to run a whole moon that produces almost nothing for itself. Luna is more or less a glorified office block now, a glitzy place for the rich and famous to keep their fancy apartments and parties, away from the stricter laws of Earth or the deprivation of the outer planets. There’s no middle class up here, no real way to bridge the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Either you’re born a Schu or a Parallax or a Cannon or a Tanai, one of the big-name corporate families, or the most you can hope for is to one day become a James Whitney.

The address did belong to a warehouse. It looked much the same as any warehouse, although most of the other buildings around it didn’t have guards leaning casually in the shadows of the entrances.

We stood in the shadows, too far away for them to catch sight of us, or for an ill-timed wind to carry our voices across to them. A quick reconnaissance trip around had indicated this as the best way in, especially if we could be quick. Visible just inside the doorway was a much bigger obstacle than the guards: a bulky silver box, casting a shimmering blue field across the doorway. The other entrances and all the lower-level windows had the same, what Lou confidently identified as electromagnetic shielding. Depending on the setting, if he walked through that it’d either knock him out or fry him beyond repair. He hadn’t been kidding about Whitney being afraid of him.

James Whitney’s car was parked outside.

“I wonder if he can do anything that’s not comically ostentatious,” Lou remarked. I was using a pair of magnifying lenses; his were apparently built in. “There’s no justification for that color.”

“The guy likes green,” I said. “I mean, you’ve _met _him, right?’

Lou sighed. “Wish I hadn’t. It’s comforting to know I’ve ruined at least one of those awful velvet suits.”

“Alright,” I said, flicking the lenses off. “What’s the plan?”

“I think our best bet is to go along the edge of the low wall as far as we can and then go straight for it. Take them out from a distance as fast as we can, if at all possible, but we’re almost definitely going to get some unwanted attention.”

“So you welcome any new guests to the party while I get in there and take out the box.”

“Exactly,” Lou said. He was standing close to me, his eyes fixed on the scene before us. In the dark, his violet eye glowed faintly with the light of luminescent circuitry running through the iris. Not once since leaving Jed’s had he questioned the fact that I was still with him.

I couldn’t think of a single action in my life that had come from a place of conviction. Just whims. I binged and crashed my way through life until I hit rock bottom, picked a way out with no particular goal in mind. Lou, though — Lou was looking at that building like it was the only thing in his world. Something about that utter certainty make me quake somewhere deep inside. Maybe I was impressed. Maybe I was scared. Even now, I don’t know.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “Are you sure that you trust me to be able to do this? Because if you do, you’ll be the first, including me.”

He laid a hand on my shoulder. “Kostya,” he said, “don’t be an idiot.”

What the hell was I supposed to have said to that?

The first guard went down like a sack of ball bearings, but the second was wearing some kind of blast armor under his ill-fitting suit jacket and took my shot with a grunt of pain. He was bigger than either of us by an impressive margin, so when we reached him after our mad sprint across the glassy basalt yard I went low, trying to hit him straight on with my shoulders and knock him off-balance. He stumbled a bit, but I could feel his hands already tightening on my neck when Lou caught up to me and hit him so hard in the face that _I _could feel it.

The big guy toppled over slowly like a collapsing starscraper, hitting the black ground with a _thump._ Lou didn’t even spare him a glance; he just reached down and offered me a hand up.

I accepted, stumbling to my feet with a grunt. “Wow, I have got to get myself some metal fists,” I said. “Okay. Uh, hold the door.”

Lou nodded.

It was dark as hell inside the place, even compared to outside, but the silvery generator box for the EM field was conveniently emitting a whole lot of bright blue light. It was almost beautiful, for a deadly and highly illegal weapon. I touched the screen on top of it and it asked me for a password.

Well, fuck that. I brought Jed’s crowbar down on it with all my strength and the casing buckled and rattled like an old AC unit. From outside came another gunshot and the sound of Lou grunting in pain, so I brought it down again, and was rewarded with a bigger dent—

I really hate explosions.

When the roar of heat and light and force had faded, I was lying on the floor, coughing, my lungs clutching for the air that had been driven out of them. I rolled over blindly, got onto my hands and knees, spat blood-tinged onto the floor, and then took a look at my handiwork.

It was hard to see, but I must have hit the generator’s fuel cell or something. One side of it was blown outward, the metal thankfully ductile enough that it had torn and warped instead of peppering me with shrapnel. The field of blue was gone, which was good. Lou was still not inside, which was less good. My ears were still ringing, which was extremely not good, so I gritted my teeth and told my uplink to bypass my eardrums.

Having sonic waves deposited directly from the bones and meat of your skull into your brain is not a pleasant experience at the best of times, and worse when the sounds involved are violent, but it was gonna have to do until I could get to a hospital and have my inner ears rebuilt. I stumbled to my feet and lurched toward the open door, suppressing the urge to vomit, and raised my gun.

I’m not as good a shot as Lou even when I’m not blinking the remnants of an explosion out of my eyes, and my first shot went wide; but the second stun laser hit the nasty-looking bastard who had Lou by the collar, right in the shoulder. He grunted, but didn’t release; not surprising, because to wrestle with a guy whose muscle strength can be measured in horsepower, you have to be on a _lot _of inadvisable supplements. This goon looked like his steroids were administered via punching.

Lou spotted me. Somehow, he managed to get his feet on the ground and wrench the guy around, presenting me with a back that would have been about as easy to miss as the side of an interplanetary freighter. I hit him four times just to make sure; it wasn’t as though it was going to do any more damage to his nerves that the steroids already had. When he went down, he didn’t even relax; if anything he seized up, and I had to stumble my way over to help Lou pull his arms apart.

The explosion hadn’t left me in great shape. I knew a fractured rib when I felt one, and half my best senses were shot. But I could work with those things. Lou, on the other hand, looked like he’d been hit by a truck — and granted, the truck had come off worse, as the six or seven unconscious bodies on the ground around us indicated, but old Scraps was going to have a few more mismatched parts when this was done.

“See, this is why I don’t get into fights, buddy,” I said, hauling him back upright just as he had done for me a couple of minutes prior. “I hope you had an insurance policy on that face.”

“Well, normally I’ve got great coverage, but right now my employer and I are having some disagreements about the handling of my account.” He didn’t move like a living human in pain, but there was something clearly wrong with his movement, a discomforting judder. It perturbed me more than I had expected, to see this relentless, implacable man falter.

But falter or not, he didn’t stop. He paused for a moment in the doorway, leaning on the frame, then said, “Whatever happens. Whatever it takes. I’m gonna go get her.”

“_We’re _going to go get her,” I said.

He smiled at that. And I followed him in.

Big as the place was, it didn’t seem like this was a location that Whitney’s people used heavily. It was storage, I thought — there were massive construction robots here, their powered-down bulks looming above us as we crept through the dark; huge crates, their sides marked in a dozen languages; piles of scrap and machinery like indistinct jagged monsters in the shadows.

When I spotted our ahead of us, I revised my assessment from ‘unused’ to ‘abandoned,’ or maybe ‘waiting.’ It had been bothering me since the bar that this whole operation was a lot cruder than Whitney’s typical style. He worked by putting people in his debt, by giving them just enough of what they wanted. Lou had given me no indication that he and his daughter had had a reason _not _to work with Whitney, so why not just hire her? Why kidnap a kid?

The simplest answer was that he needed her _now _and not later. No self-respecting organized crime outfit, especially not one with as many synths on its payrolls as Whitney’s, _especially _not one whose biggest rival was currently riding up his tailpipe, went without a repairman; which mean that if his robot-doctor had been arrested, or had kicked the bucket unexpectedly, then a replacement would have to be found immediately. No time for subtly courting loyalties. The massive expense of getting a genuine unassigned travel pass was nothing if he was desperate enough.

The only lights in the warehouse were in the back, in a shadowy area beneath the massive stacks of crates that had been made up as some combination of laboratory, workshop, and back room surgery. Tables were laid out with a variety of machines and tools that I couldn’t have named if my life depended on it. There were four people in the center of the space, black shapes against the sudden brightness.

One of them was a teenage girl with a basilisk’s glare and bloody knuckles. She was seated at a table, her hands out in front of her, cuffed to a metal ring set in the tabletop. The source of her scorn was a good-looking man, pale and fad-diet-ad thin, resplendent in toxic green velvet, smoking something that was noxious even from a distance and looking down at her with a patronizing smile. Whatever he was saying to her, she wasn’t buying it. Two more bland-looking individuals in bland-looking suits stood just behind him — neither quite as steroidally inflamed as our snoozing friends outside, which usually indicated that they were much more dangerous.

I sent Lou my question over the uplink, rather than bother whispering. “I can’t make that shot. Can you?”

Lou’s eyes narrowed, and he nodded, once. Then he drew his pistol silently up, took careful aim, and fired.

His aim was impeccable. The laser burst hit Whitney just to the left of his spine, and he lurched forward with the impact — but as it hit him, a blue light flared to life around him, dissipating the blast into light and heat. Not fucking _possible. _There was no way.

“Whoever did that, find them and kill them.” Whitney’s voice rang out through the echoing heights of the warehouse, before he had even straightened up.

Knowing that he’d have come up with a way to keep Lou out, we’d planned for the electromagnetic generators. We’d planned for the shimmering force field over the doors, for the guards. What we had _not _planned for was a personal shielding device, the cost of which would have made even my old man think twice. That was the kind of stuff that presidents and kings and the Neptunian Anti-Pope had, not a lunar gangster.

Well, a desperate lunar gangster with a kidnapped tech prodigy, maybe. Damn it.

There was no time to think of that, though, since there were two very unfriendly guards coming to visit us.

When Lou had taken the shot at Whitney, the beam of his laser had been red, not the telltale orange of a stun blast. It was a decision that I respected, and hell, maybe if I had been taking the shot I would have made the same choice. But as it was, it wasn’t one I was ready to make just yet. I wasn’t a fighter, not a soldier, not a father.

Whitney’s goons hit us like a brick wall. Lou hit back like a freight train. I shot the one who came at me and she didn’t even flinch, so she just slammed into me full force and both of us went crashing to the ground.

It was bad. When she hit me, my nose gave way with a noise that made me sick, and instantly there was blood on my face, blood in my mouth, blood running down into my collar. As we hit the ground, I put my right arm out behind me to catch myself and was rewarded with a sharp pain that made me bite through my lip with the shock of it. Before I could catch my breath, her hands were around my throat. Everything was pain, pain and more than I knew I could even feel.

But my pistol was still in my hand, and not even the kind of high-end armor she was wearing could fully displace four stun blasts from an inch away as quick as I fired them. I got a grunt of pain for my efforts rather than unconsciousness, but her grip on my throat loosened and I managed to throw my weight to the side and roll the tangled mass of our bodies across the floor. I couldn’t see well enough to ‘use the terrain,’ but I might be able to get above her.

Somewhere out of my field of vision, Lou screamed.

It shook me. He’d taken hits back by the door, bad ones, but he hadn’t screamed. It was a horrible noise. The sound of something that had been shaped and taught to act as organic as possible, to act like a thing with genetic impulses and an uncomfortable meaty body and a nervous system, but that now couldn’t conceal its true nature — sharp and metal and in _pain_.

For the first time I heard another voice, young and afraid, yelling, “_Dad!_”

Suddenly I was very motivated. I was also on the top of our melee now, and I grabbed her by the shirt, veered backwards, and then slammed down with my entire body weight.

The sound of her head hitting the floor was not a good sound. It also did not stop her, although I managed to wrench loose from her chokehold. Then it was just hitting, the way that hitting is: ugly and harsh, meat against meat, the simplest and least elegant way human beings have of hurting one another. I hit her in the teeth. She broke a couple more of my ribs. There was no time for strategy or technique, just the vicious determination to kill the other guy first.

The fact was that this fight was not going to end well for me. I was not a fighter. She was. I had found an unexpected well of determination, but all that did was let me hold out for a while, and eventually she was either going to hit me too hard to get up from, or she was going to get her hands around my neck again.

Except that neither of those things happened. Instead, we rolled over again and smashed hard into the unyielding wall of a metal shipping container, her on top again, and in the dim light I could see her leering face and smell her breath.

Then the shot rang out.

I felt the impact and shoved her off of me, scrambled away across the floor as fast as I could, felt hot tears run down my face as electric pain shot up my busted arm and through my chest.

Lou was standing above me, but only barely. If I wasn’t already gasping for air, seeing how bad he looked would have knocked the wind out of me. Chunks of his hair ripped out, a wide gash across his neck that exposed cables and wiring underneath. From somewhere he was giving off sparks every few seconds. And it was clear that there was more serious damage, too, underneath his skin and clothes; if he had veins, he’d have been a bloody mess.

“Shit,” I managed. “Are you alright?”

“Not alright,” he said, “but upright. Can you stand?”

I rolled uneasily over onto my knees. Every muscle and bone I owned complained about it, but I made it to my feet, shaking. I didn’t want to move my wounded forearm, but it was also my gun hand, so I would just have to grit my teeth and bear it.

“Hello, gentlemen. What a thrilling show. You can put the guns down now.”

James Whitney had a voice like a game show host, a smile that belonged on a late-night syndicated stream, a face right out of a movie poster. He’d turned the full, disconcerting charm of all three of them on us, barely standing at the edge of the pool of light.

Whitney was standing behind the table that Goose was handcuffed to, one hand outstretched. In that hand was a gun as unnecessarily loud and large as the rest of his personality. The end of the barrel was hovering about an inch away from the uplink port on Goose’s left temple.

Lou called Whitney the rudest thing I had heard him say yet. Something in the back of my mind wondered where he _got _these. It was a pity it didn’t look like I’d live to ask him.

“_You _can put the gun down, Whitney,” I said, which was roughly as useful as what Lou had said, and probably less cathartic.

“You think I won’t do it?” Whitney said, nudging the gun against Goose’s head. “Trust me, I will. I’ve earned the right to have a few fancy things, sure, but I started on the street. I’m not afraid to get my own hands dirty.”

Next to me, Lou was frozen. My brain, usually so quick to throw up a bad idea, was working like mad. A way out of this, a crazy plan, any clue of what to do. I came up with all of nothing.

“Really?” I said, after a moment. “Would you? After all this effort and expense to get her?”

“As valuable as she is to me, Cannon, the most valuable person to me happens to be _me_. And despite his fascinating refusal to kill any of my employees, our friend has made his intentions regarding me very clear.”

It was hard to argue with that. He’d do it. I believed him.

I turned off the stun on my pistol.

“The thing is,” he said. “I don’t think I have to. Because I don’t think you _really _want her.”

Lou let out a sharp laugh.

“Not you, Oliver,” Whitney said dismissively. “I’m done with you. I’m talking to my friend Konstantin here.”

“See, that’s a stretch of the definition of ‘friend’ even for me,” I said. I wasn’t going to be able to keep pointing my gun at him forever, for purely mechanical reasons. It was probably not much more than a fracture, but my bones were complaining loudly about having to hold the weight of the gun steady.

“Now,” Whitney said, “didn’t we meet at that lovely get-together of your father’s all those years ago? Haven’t we been doing business ever since? I have a lot of customers, of course, but I kept up with you. You’re an interesting fellow, Cannon. With an interesting name.”

“I absolutely promise you that you cannot use me to get my father to do _anything_.”

“Oh, no, no, of course not,” Whitney agreed. “But see, here’s the thing. I’ve followed you. I know the kind of trouble you get yourself into, and let’s be honest — this isn’t it, is it? This is out of your comfort zone. Out of your depth. Why are you doing it, Konstantin? He can’t be paying you _that _much.”

“Maybe it’s out of the sweet goodness of my rosy-scented heart.”

“Kostya.” That was Lou again, that low, cautioning voice now split with feedback.

“I know what he’s trying to do, Lou, and I’m not gonna buy it,” I snapped. There was blood running down my face and it itched and I wanted to wipe it away but I couldn’t, not now.

“You don’t have to _buy _anything, Kostya,” Whitney said. “You just have to stop pointing your gun at me, and shoot Mister Oliver.”

For a second, I was too floored by the sheer bloody-minded audacity of what he’d just said to react to it.

Then the bad idea I’d been waiting for arrived.

Sudden ideas had led me into most of the trouble in my life. This one was special, because it was not only impressively self-destructive, but exceedingly destructive to the two people in the room whose wellbeing had, unfathomably, been entrusted to me.

But I didn’t exactly have any other ideas.

“Are you trying to _hire _me, Whitney?” I said. My gun arm faltered, ever so slightly.

Whitney noticed. Whitney smiled.

“I’m certainly interested,” he said. “Let’s be honest — you’ve already been peripheral to my organization for some time. Why not take the leap?”

“That’s not a leap,” Lou said. His voice was accompanied by a horrible grinding noise, like steel on bone. “It’s a freefall.”

“A state to which Mister Cannon is already more than accustomed.”

“Now, that stings,” I said. “That’s no way to talk to a potential employee.”

“True enough, true enough,” Whitney said. “Then here’s my pitch, Kostya. It’s simple. Shoot the synthetic. Then put your gun down, and leave this building with me, and I will give you everything you’ve ever wanted.”

“Even the unicorns?”

“Now, Kostya, don’t be childish.”

“You must be pretty desperate to scrape the barrel like this.” My hand dropped another inch. It was an effort not to scream. “Whatever Salazar Keys is planning must have you pretty scared, huh? This has got to be a really inconvenient time to deal with us.”

For just a moment I caught it, there in his eyes — that desperation, that hunger. Then it was masked again, but for that moment, I had seen what it was that James Whitney wanted. And I could give it to him.

“A sharp observation. Big things are happening in these seas, Cannon. Arguments over just who is the biggest fish. And if I’m going to put that upstart Keys back in line when the time comes, then I could do with the kind of guy who could make it this far in here. How do you feel about that? Give that dad of yours something to _really _think about?” He grinned. “Help me out in this time of need and hey, maybe I can even snag you the same deal I offered your ingrate friend there. A one-way ticket to Earthly paradise, no questions asked. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

And I knew he could, was the thing. And it would be, was the thing.

I swallowed, which did nothing to get the taste of blood out of my mouth. “What the hell good would that do me?”

“Oh, Kostya, don’t play stupid. You’re not a nobody like Lou here. Of course Earth means nothing to him, it’s just another place to be a nobody, but _you? _You’ve got a _name. _You’ve got a foothold. There’s an army of people across this solar system who would jump at the chance to employ a Cannon, even if it was just to stick it to your old man. And I bet you’d like _that_, right? You could get a nice cushy job anywhere you wanted, no real work, just going to the best parties in the universe to show off to everyone that Alexei Cannon can’t even keep his own son’s allegiance. That could be your future. All you’ve got to do is shoot your buddy there.”

I tore my gaze away from Whitney. I looked at Lou.

Lou met my eyes. His own were steady and unafraid.

“I’d have to be an idiot to take you up on that,” I said, and even I knew my voice was shaking.

And Lou smiled.

I shot him just below his theoretical ribcage, where he’d told me his fuel cell was. My gun wasn’t set to stun anymore and the blast tore straight through him, leaving a neat little hole that started to dribble battery acid. There’s not a lot of places you can hit on a synth that will put them out of commission in one shot, but even with my quivering hand and lousy aim, I had done it. He fell over slowly and I felt the sound of his impact reverberate through every bone in my skull.

I felt Goose’s scream, too. She didn’t bother pretending to be tough, just let loose a stream of invective pointed at me and Whitney that impressed even jaded old me with the breadth and vitriol of her vocabulary. Any possible doubt that she was Lou’s daughter vanished.

Whitney’s smile was game-show white and wide.

“See,” he said. “I knew we could work together. Come on out of that mess, Cannon. Come out here! We’re all friends and coworkers now, aren’t we?”

Slowly, doing my best not to limp and failing, I stepped away from Lou and into the warm yellow light of the workshop. Goose was trying to set me on fire with her eyes, but had stopped yelling. She didn’t even seem to care that Whitney had taken his gun away from her head.

I reached them, and leaned back against one of the workbenches, doing my best to make it look casual and tough rather than like I was about to collapse into a bloody heap. But I _had _to hold it together. “Hell of a hiring process,” I coughed, tasting yet more blood and hoping my broken ribs hadn’t punctured a lung. “Is there gonna be an interview too? Because I suck at those.”

Whitney chuckled, and holstered his gun. Goose’s eyes immediately fixed on it, but it was obvious to anyone that it was too far from her hands to be any good to her.

“Kostya, my friend,” Whitney said, “for you, I think we can skip the usual paperwork. I’m quite satisfied with your character references as is. Welcome to the business.”

With that last sentence, Whitney gave me a friendly clap on the shoulder — a dominant move, clearly designed to hurt, a reminder of who would be the boss here. I was covered in dirt and gravel and blood, but of course, Whitney wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.

I stabbed him so hard that I felt my already-damaged forearm snap, and I muffled my scream in the shoulder of his stupid suit as I drove the little knife I had found in Jed’s office up straight through his ribs, slamming him back against the table with the force of my movement. Sharpened bulkhead alloy was hard enough that bone was barely an obstacle, not the way I came at him.

I felt, rather than heard, as the air went out of him with the impact. It didn’t go back in. There were no last words, no last offers. Just a lot more blood on the floor, and when I finally managed, shaking, to step away, to loosen my hand, he collapsed like someone had turned off the antigrav.

There’s no way of knowing how long I stood there, propping myself up on the table with one hand, staring at the thing that used to be Whitney. But eventually some neuron fired in my head again, reminded me of the plan, reminded me that I had to move. I tore my gaze away and fixed on the only other living person left in the room.

Goose’s eyes were a frightened animal’s eyes, wide and feral; but a predator, not prey. I figured I had probably confused her, so I spent a few more precious seconds working up the ability to speak again before forcing out the words, “Your father trusted me.”

“Yeah, I’ll fucking bet he did,” she said, and her voice was colder than a moon with no atmosphere.

“Interrupting is rude,” I croaked. “You’re a technological genius in a warehouse full of tools and parts, brought here just for you. You kept him running for a decade that should have been impossible.”

No smart answer this time, which in my experience is an achievement when talking to any teenager. Just that wary gaze, as fixed and compelling as Lou’s.

“So, when I break your handcuffs with this crowbar,” I said, “instead of you killing me, I’m going to help you fix him.”

I’d never seen someone’s entire demeanor change so quickly. “It’s not as simple as a new fuel cell and a skin patch,” she said. “His internal systems are delicate, constantly maintained. The longer he goes without power, the more damage there is, the harder it is to make any of it work again.”

“Then how fast are you?” I asked.

Maybe it was a combination of fear and adrenaline that did it, rather than excitement, but she bared her teeth in a grin. “The fastest,” she said, with an utter confidence that I had come to know well.

“Cool,” I said, and with all of my remaining strength, brought the crowbar down on the metal chain of the cuffs.

* * *

I’d never seen a synth-surgeon work before, but I can’t imagine there are many more impressive than Goose McShane. In a room full of half-rusted scrap metal and tools I couldn’t pretend to understand, she somehow found everything she needed in less than five minutes. During that time I was following her shouted instructions to crack open Lou’s abdominal cavity, doing my best to wipe away oozing battery fluid without getting any on my skin. I resisted the urge to make a stress-induced joke about how this wasn’t how I had imagined taking Lou’s shirt off; the only person here who would appreciate that one was technically dead right now.

His insides were an incomprehensible morass of metal and glass and dead indicator lights and all I could do at that point was do my best not to drip blood into them. Goose sprinted over from the far side of the room, skidding the final few feet on her knees. She had a fuel cell in her hand that looked absolutely nothing like the one inside of Lou, and an armful of wires and bits and pieces I could never attempt to put a name to.

“What else can I do?” I asked, as she set to work.

She spared me almost half a second’s worth of a glance. “Do you know first aid?”

“Uh, a little. Why? Is that applicable to him?”

“No. Do it to yourself. There’s a kit in the big trunk of tools next to the circular saw.”

I conceded the point without argument — there’s a first time for everything — and made my slow, painful way over to the trunk in question, leaving a sad little trail of blood behind me. Opening the lid was like climbing Olympus Mons, and I probably deserve some kind of medal for managing it, but I found my way to the first aid kit and set about doing what little I could for myself. It didn’t take me long; there wasn’t a whole lot I could do.

Then I sat there, my back up against the trunk, and watched Goose work. I knew our time was measured in minutes, and probably few enough to count on both hands. But I had done my best to make it a clean shot, only one part that needed replacing, and I hoped. I did my best to trust my aim, to trust Goose’s skills, as Lou had trusted both of us. I wondered how the hell he managed to go around doing all this trusting if it was this stressful all the time.

An insistent beeping inside my thoughts was informing me that continuing to stream the environmental sound directly into my braincase was probably going to start turning parts of me into liquids if I didn’t stop it when Goose did something that clicked, loudly. Then she sat back, watching her father, holding her breath. I held mine too, straining for the faintest feeling of sound.

Nothing happened.

“Come on, Dad,” Goose said quietly, leaning forward and reaching into his chest and making more things click. “_Please.”_

Lou’s hand moved.

“Goose,” I choked out, but she had already seen, had grabbed his hand in hers and was beaming, laughing, breaking into tears.

“MAIN SYSTEMS REBOOT IN PROCESS,” said a smooth, emotionless voice that both was and was not Lou’s, and which emerged from somewhere in his throat without his lips moving. “SERVICE REQUIRED URGENTLY.”

Goose had already closed the bits of him that we had opened up, was getting to her feet, holding her dad underneath the armpits. She had the antigrav unit from some kind of luggage or cart in one hand, strung on a bungee cord, was fumbling to attach it to Lou. “Can you walk?” she demanded, her tone indicating that my helpfulness had done very little to balance out the fact that I had shot him in the first place.

“Let’s find out,” I said.

I got to my feet. I took a step. Rinse, lather, repeat. Walking was, contrary to all scientific evidence, possible. There wasn’t much I could do to help Goose with the metal dead weight of Lou’s body, but she seemed to be willing to handle that just fine on her own with the assistance of the antigrav. Without another word, the three of us stumbled back into the dark of the warehouse, headed for the freer dark of the open air.

My uplink handily called emergency services without me asking it to, a function I made a mental note to disable with extreme prejudice as soon as I wasn’t so dizzy with blood loss that I couldn’t operate the damn thing. The police showed up, an ambulance showed up. I was going to the hospital, Lou and Goose were going somewhere they refused to specify, with Goose insisting that she was completely unhurt as well as his primary physician. I doubted that the former was true, but apparently arguing with her was about as futile as arguing with her father, because off they went. The police asked me a lot of questions until the team they sent inside came out and informed their boss that the most dangerous man on the moon was dead on the floor in there, at which point they suddenly seemed to have better things to do than bother me.

The folks at the emergency room took one look at the shambling wreck that the paramedics dragged in and shunted me right to the top of the triage list. I paid with one of my father’s account numbers. There was too much enjoyment to be gotten out of sending the old bastard a massive bill for injuries acquired in the course of unsavory activities to worry about the ethics of accepting his money. He didn’t contact me anymore, but I could imagine him fuming over the bill — a drop in the ocean of his wealth, but an unwelcome reminder of his most embarrassing failure — and it helped me sleep better at night.

To be fair, the painkillers helped too, and they gave me plenty of those. I also had lots of time to think about the fact that I had sent my drug dealer to another planet and stabbed my supplier to death; because while the doctors never directly confronted me, I suddenly started seeing promotions for rehab clinics in among the medical charts, pill ads, and assorted proprietary entertainment for the bedridden that the hospital’s network flooded my uplink with during my extended stay. I would have rolled my eyes if my uplink wouldn’t have interpreted that as interest, but it was definitely becoming apparent that I was going to have to make some major lifestyle changes, whether I wanted to or not. Whether I wanted to … that was a question I was revisiting for the first time in a long time.

Long before that, however, only twenty-four hours after my arrival, Goose showed up at the side of my bed. I was pleasantly bodiless with painkillers, but I noticed that someone had clumsily bandaged her bloodied hands, and I doubted it had been a doctor. Even in that state, I was apparently a good enough detective to string together those clues, and I felt relief wash over me.

“We’re going,” she said quietly. I wondered whether she had been let in here or had broken in, and figured the latter. “We have to hide, lay low for a while. Don’t look for us. The money’s in your account.”

I was in no place to respond with words, but I think that I managed a nod.

Goose turned to go, but then she paused and looked back at me. Genetics or not, I could see her dad’s steely gaze in those eyes.

“You’re a real bastard,” she said, “but thank you.”

Then she was gone.

* * *

The only thing about the Moon that’s worse than the week of the month where it’s always nighttime is the week where the sun never has the decency to set. Even a lifelong Looney like me who’s never left the rock can feel the wrongness of it, deep in our bones — a few centuries of space travel can’t undo millions of years of circadian rhythms telling us that the sun is supposed to go _down _now. I found that I usually felt this ancestral instinct most powerfully when it was late in the afternoon on a Friday.

I was seriously considering performing the arduous task of actually getting up and shutting my blinds against the ridiculous brightness when Axel’s head poked around the door.

“Uhh. So…”

“Yes, it’s after six, you can go out,” I said, not even bothering with a sigh. “Just don’t make me bail you out again, okay?”

My assistant noticeably brightened at this. “You can’t take that back now, and also thank you again very much for helping me out with that, but actually I was going to tell you that there’s someone here to see you.”

“I can absolutely rescind that decision but I won’t,” I said, ignoring the complaints of my knees as I stood up. “Listen, just — be responsible, alright? Don’t get into any trouble that you don’t know for sure you can get out of. And my help is _not _to be included in that calculation.”

“Sure thing, _Dad_,” she said jokingly. “Need me to pick anything up?”

“A sense of respect.”

“You don’t pay me enough for that.” The puffball of Axel’s hair vanished around the doorframe again, and by the time I had reached it and stepped into the outer office, she had disappeared into whatever ether kids vanish into to have fun these days.

The person who _was _in the room turned to give me an amused look, jabbing a thumb towards the door. “You should be careful she doesn’t get arrested for speeding,” he said. “I’ve never seen anyone move quite so fast without wheels.”

He didn’t look the way he had when he first stepped into my office, months earlier, and it wasn’t just because of the absence of a halo of drug-induced wonder making him look like a chiseled chrome angel. The structure of his face had been altered — a whole new faceplate, I thought, whether to hide or because his own had been damaged beyond repair. His hair was no longer military-short, now combed back neatly over his forehead, and his voice might have been pitched up ever so slightly, although it was hard to tell after not hearing it for so long.

But his right eye was still deep brown, his left eye still vividly purple, and it would be a lie to claim that I hadn’t been looking for them in every face I had passed for months.

“You should have seen me at that age when my dad got home,” I said. “Shit. How’ve you been?”

“Bored, frankly. You wouldn’t believe how little there is to do when you’re lying low — it got to the point where we were considering giving me an extra pair of arms just for kicks.” Lou stepped forward and took one of my hands in both of his. “But what about you? I never even got to thank you for what you did for us.”

“Well, you paid me, and I _shot _you, so I think we’re square,” I said. “I’m — I guess I’m alright.”

“This place looks a lot nicer.”

“Wow, thanks. Yeah, turns out the business went better when I stopped taking my dad’s money and just … advertised and networked and all those things it turns out legitimate businesses do. Plus literally killing James Whitney got me a whole lot of publicity, and the gossip streams loved the whole business with the getting disowned and the rehab, which apparently is a pretty good referral to some people’s minds.”

“Congratulations, by the way.”

“On trying to go sober or getting disowned?” I joked. “Not like I had a lot of choice in either matter. Listen, it’s a work in progress.” It had also been easily one of the worst months of my life, but I didn’t feel like bringing that up when I was in such a good mood all of a sudden.

But that had made Lou laugh, and I realized how much I had missed this guy I’d known for one ridiculously painful day months ago.

“And you haven’t had angry mobsters lining up at your door?” he asked.

“Well, it turns out that killing the most dangerous man on the moon right when his rival is planning a takeover lands you with a new most dangerous man on the moon who’s a fan of your work. How’s the kid?”

His eyes lit up. Something about him seemed lighter, happier now — which made sense, considering that the last time I’d seen him, he was a suspect in his kidnapped daughter’s supposed murder. Like everything, happiness suited him.

“Good,” he said. “Amazing, in fact. She’s got a new job that I am absolutely certain has no connection to the mob, and you’d better believe I checked. With a little luck, we’ll be able to stay well away from that lot from now on.”

“Sounds like it’s good news all round.” I leaned on Axel’s desk, feeling awfully contented. Maybe it was the sunlight slatting through the blinds, which suddenly didn’t seem so bad. “But if there are no more mobsters to give the boot, what leads you to darken my door?”

He gave me an amused look. “As I said, I never thanked you. But also, I think you owe _me _something.”

“That is … drawing a blank,” I said. “Um. What is it?”

“Back in the bar, you promised me you’d take me somewhere nice.” I don’t know if it was a robot thing, but I swear his eyes were positively sparkling. “But I distinctly remember that you took me to a place where I got shot instead.”

“That, uh, sounds about right. Sorry about that, by the way. A lot. I was hoping you’d get what I mean, when I said that I’d have to be—”

“I did,” he interrupted me. “I trusted you.”

Steady and smiling and certain, he stood there, coat over one arm, shoulder braced against the wall of my office. Like my split-second decision had been fine. Like I hadn’t almost gotten us both killed. Like he had always been sure that this sequence of events would, somehow, lead us to this place. Like he was sure of what was coming next.

Shit, it wasn’t like he was my client anymore.

“Then I would be very much obliged if you’d allow me to make it up to you,” I said. “Owing to the disappointment and the inconvenience and all.”

His laughter this time was less dignified, more of a snort. “Inconvenience. That’s a hell of a thing to call shooting me, Kostya.”

I made a helpless gesture. “Well, like I said, Lou, let me make it up to you! I might even have somewhere in mind.”

“That sounds nice. Should I expect mobsters?”

“No, but there’s plenty of alcohol.”

“Sounds perfect. When were you thinking?”

“How about right now?”

“My evening is free.”

“Well then.” I crossed the room to where my coat hung beside the door, and then paused, turning back to him to say, “Actually, maybe not the place I had in mind, because the drinks are great but it’s kind of known for fights.”

Lou grinned, sharp and white. “Don’t worry. Remember, I like to get into a good scrap every now and then.”

And I couldn’t help thinking that I might be coming around to the idea myself.

**Author's Note:**

> goose won't kill kostya when she finds out he's dating her dad but she WILL dig up the fact that he was a contestant on, and was eliminated in the first round of, the 56th season of the moon's version of The Bachelor and she will absolutely never let that go


End file.
